Castles and Coprolites

The beginning of the semester at Newcastle is just flying by. So many exciting opportunities for the future - but right now a little something from the past. Back in 2010 I started a postdoctoral position with the BioArCh group at the University of York, investigating food residues in pottery from Durrington Walls, thought to be the settlement that housed the builders of Stonehenge. I've blogged about the progress of the project on a number of occasions , and wrote about it for the Day of Archaeology back in 2012. This week the academic paper from all that hard work was  published in Antiquity journal, along with a university press release , and it's very satisfying to see the final results in print. Being related to Stonehenge, I suspected it may be of general interest, and I was quite excited to see whether the media would run the story. I spent yesterday evening watching with a combination of awe and horror at how this process unfolds - a carefully worded story of science...

Back in March I mentioned that I was involved in a sciart collaboration, where artists and scientists come together to work on collaborative art projects, inspired by scientific research. I love this idea. I was always really into both art and science growing up (and took Art as an A Level subject!), and although I choose to go down the 'science' route for my career, I have maintained a keen interest in art, and particularly how we can use artistic expression to communicate scientific research. The artist I have been working with is Molly McEwan , an Edinburgh based artist and graduate of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and talented ceramicist.  The photos to the left are a sneak preview from Molly's exhibition at Wednesday's Girl, a free exhibition showcasing the work of female artists from Scotland, held at Space Club and supported by Somewhere To , an organisation provides spaces and venues for young people across the UK. Molly's solo exhibition , ...

Happy new year from Castles and Coprolites! The first news item of 2014 is a write-up by Michael Balter about the latest research on Stonehenge, featuring snippets about my work on pottery residues as part of the Feeding Stonehenge project , as well as summaries of work by the faunal team and other specialists. There's also a brief mention of our unpublished pilot study on pottery residues at the Ness of Brodgar, which we carried out as a comparison whilst working on the Durrington Walls assemblage. If you'd like to read it and don't have access to Science online, drop me an email and I can send you a pdf. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/343/6166/18

My postdoc work on the pottery residues for the Feeding Stonehenge project was featured on the Channel 4 documentary last night Secrets of the Stonehenge Skeletons. The organic residues PI, Dr Oliver Craig did a great job of explaining the methods we have been using, with a few hints at our results - full details won't be available until we publish the research towards the end of the year (and complete our statistical analysis to confirm our interpretations!). The work is also featured as one of this week's main news stories on the University of York website here and the Department of Archaeology news page here . http://www.channel4.com/programmes/secrets-of-the-stonehenge-skeletons/4od As Ol explains, this is one of the largest studies of pottery residues from a single site (over 300 individual pots were analysed), and by designing a sampling strategy with GIS and other specialists, we have been able to investigate spatial differences in pottery use across the site, be...

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog post as part of the Day of Archaeology which aims to give people an insight into the variety of work that archaeoklogists around the world do. There are some really fascinating stories on there, and it was great to see a few posts from fellow Çatalhöyük types ( faunal team and human remains team ) on what they are up to this year. This is the first season in a long time that I won't be heading out this summer. We are just too busy finishing off all the lab work for Feeding Stonehenge. My post outlined a typical day in the bioarchaeology lab at the University of York, featuring more of those poetry inspiring pot sherds from Durrington Walls. This is just a little follow on to explain what happened next.... So, we got to the point of putting the extracted samples on the GC/MS which works something like this: Step 4 actually involves a lot of manual checking of the data to make sure what the computer thinks the lipids are is correct - it c...

Shall I compare thee to a pot of clay? Perhaps organic or sand tempered. Your form and fabric over time decay, Contact with water rehydroxylates. Sometimes too hot the flame of kiln shines, And often is the vessel warped and curved; And every pot from pot sometime declines, By chance, or taphonomic paths, preserved; But thy lipid presence shall not fade, The use of pottery for food can be assessed, Petrography perhaps reveals how you were made, Control of fire temporally progressed. The wonders of ceramic technology, Shift from PPN to PN prehistory.